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Freenet Version 0.7 Release Candidate 1 Available
apostle5406 writes to mention that the "Freenet" project (a global peer-to-peer publishing network) has unveiled their first release candidate. "Freenet 0.7 is a ground-up rewrite of Freenet. The key user-facing feature in Freenet 0.7 is the ability to operate Freenet in a "darknet" mode, where your Freenet node will only talk to other Freenet users that you trust. This makes it much more difficult for an adversary to discover that you are using Freenet, let alone what you are doing with it. 0.7 also includes significant improvements to both security and performance."
Seems like Freenet is really pursuing their namesake, and setting themselves up specifically to provide a means of communication within otherwise locked down and totalitarian environments. A commendable goal I think. I have to wonder though, if this level of security is actually necessary, who CAN you really trust to use this new "darknet" with? Seems like the sort of place you'd use it would also be the sort of place where you could trust no one.
Yes, but why would that be a problem? The really CPU-intensive stuff is handled in native code anyway on most platforms (with Java fallbacks). I'm running it on a 1.4GHz Athlon (not exactly modern...) and it's using typically 10-20% of the CPU (though that number will rise on a faster connection).
Performance is limited by network connections, mostly. The real performance question is how quickly the developers can improve it and find and fix bugs, and if they say Java helps in that regard, then Java is a good choice.
I'm not surprised that the grandparent decided to post anonymously. The only thing worse for your slashdot karma than criticizing Apple in a comment on an Apple story is to criticize BSD or Freenet in a comment on a BSD or Freenet story. The grandparent (who has now been modded down to -1, Troll) is factually correct. I tried out freenet several years ago, and poking around in the content that existed, it was extremely heavily weighted toward child pornography. Based on that observation, I made a personal decision that I didn't want to run a freenet node, because having my computer running as a freenet node meant I was contributing to that. Now we could have a reasoned debate about the issues. We could ask whether the individual has a responsibility not to contribute to this, or whether the individual is more like a common carrier. We could ask whether any government restrictions on free speech are morally and philosophically acceptable. We could talk about whether concern about child sexual abuse has turned into hysteria, and has resulted in bad legislation. We could make careful distinctions between government and private action against speech we disapprove of. Yes, we could do all these things, but we won't, because this thread is about Freenet, and therefore it will be heavily modded by people who are fans of Freenet. Ironically enough, Freenet users on Slashdot have shown unlimited willingness to use moderation to silence opposing points of view. How do I know? Because this isn't the first time I've sacrificed karma by trying to make a skeptical post about Freenet in slashdot comments on a Freenet story.
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The sad fact is that before now, only pedophiles and other criminals used something like Freenet to conceal their activities. Now that everyone (and given current eavesdropping policy in the US and laws recently passed in various EU countries, I really mean everyone) has to use it to maintain their privacy, everyone will be considered a pedophile at first. For at least 2-3 more years I think, depending on who's getting elected in the US.
However, if it really gets faster, in one year or so the useful content will override the unlawful content a hundred to one, and then maybe the medium will get some popularity at last.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
There, fixed that for you.
Performance is limited by network connections; true. It goes deeper, however, in the fact that performance is also limited by the cpu and storage of your peers, and their peers, etc....
The network should eventually level demand across nodes. If one node for some reason gets saturated, peers will eventually find data faster elsewhere, reducing its load. Lower performance machine/network nodes may end up slightly less popular and those equipped will move more traffic. Freenet has a number of ways to optimize and can be quite robust via various ways to self-heal.
Now that everyone (and given current eavesdropping policy in the US and laws recently passed in various EU countries, I really mean everyone) has to use it to maintain their privacy, everyone will be considered a pedophile at first.
The people (DoJ especially) pushing the pedophilia boogie man already think you are a pedophile. It doesn't matter if you are or not. Download the wrong file from some random person (honey pot) on a p2p network and you are fucked. I have a buddy doing 3 months in a work furlough program to prove it. (I've known him for years, he is not into children).
On a side note, last week he was fitted with a GPS anklet. His lawyer is fighting to have it removed after the 3 months. If he loses, he gets to wear that god damned thing for 3 years of probation. Justice is hiding spoon marks under that blindfold.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
When it comes to speed Freenet has still a few problems:
1) Freenet tries to keep downstream and upstream bandwidth equal, this means that it gets hard to tell if your node is downloading or uploading anything, which is good for anonymity, but it also means that you are limited to your upstream bandwidth, which with most DSL providers isn't all that great and often a tenth of your normal downstream bandwidth. There is basically no chance that this ever gets fixed.
2) Freenets datastore/cache is extremely slow, it doesn't really matter how often you already already visited a page, revisiting it again takes often a long long while, while it really should be instantaneous, after all the data is already on your machine. Tweaking a few settings in Firefox helps a bit, but the performance is still so bad that it is basically unusable for actual browsing, even if things are in your cache. This pretty much sucks, but luckily isn't by design and should be fixable.
3) KSK redirect downloads are slow, which in turns means that message systems like Frost, that are based on KSKs, are very easily spammed up to a level where you can't even download all the spam, i.e. it isn't just an annoyance but completly blocks both download and upload of messages. There is another messaging system in development and that KSK problem might also be fixable from what I understand.
Other then that Freenet works for most parts as expected. It won't win any speed records anytime soon, but it works for uploading and downloading even larger ones when you have the time.
it's a darknet.
The big draw of the Darknet system, to the best of my knowledge, is that it makes you less likely to be noticed in the first place, and you can sort of "pick & choose" which nodes your computer talks to.
Lets put this in a real world situation:
You are A tibetan, living in the U.S.; you have a Darknet made up of other Tibetans, some of them living in China, some in Tibet. You use Freenet 0.7 to plan protests.
If one of your darknet members gets caught by the chinese government, for whatever reason, they will take that persons computer and analyze it. assuming the person did not put the Freenet 0.7 files in a encrypted volume, they then have the IP address of each computer that persons Freenet 0.7 node talked to; since it's a Darknet, they know that those computers are probably involved with the same thing the person they caught was involved in.
In a Open Net (Freenet 0.5), no matter how they analyze the persons computer, they can't say anything about the other nodes the examined computer talked to except that they are running Freenet 0.5; they are still most likely screwed if they live in China or Tibet, but they could conceivably be a little less screwed.
There are some other security improvements in 0.7; nothing is stopping the Freenet developers from putting those improvements on the 0.5 system.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
You mean, like having packet sniffers on all major chokepoints that log which IPs are talking to which other IPs, in order to build up a suitably-large database for purposes of traffic analysis?
Freenet was an interesting political statement: Since inception, every statement about its security model has been prefaced by "in any sane/democratic/free country...", followed by a list of assumptions about the integrity of the telecommunications system. For example, when Freenet was first designed, NSA couldn't legally monitor domestic traffic, nor could it legally share what it found with the FBI, and FBI needed a warrant.
The political implications of the project were supposed to motivate people to lobby for stronger telecom privacy laws, lest we become as non-sane, non-democratic, and non-free as the countries in systems such as Freenet are illegal/hazardous to use.
That experiment has run its course: In post-9/11 America, of course, none of those assumptions about the telecom system are true. Although it's arguably lamentable that Post-9/11 America telecom policy is every bit as not-sane, not-free, and not-democratic as China, it's indisputable that the experiment has ended. The privacy wars are over; the Freenet guys lost.
If you were interested in Freenet because of its implications for free political speech, it's time to give up: for better or worse, anonymous political speech is dead. The only justification that I can see for its continued development is that it gives enough of the illusion of anonymity to be a fantastic self-selecting honeypot for sleazeballs, and as far as I'm concerned, said sleazeballs deserve what they get.
So, to bootstrap Freenet adoption, we need to invent some nice-sounding excuse for those casual pirates. Something that would sound like a "killer app" for Freenet.
- Hey, you're running Freenet, you must be a filthy pedophile!
- Calm down, I'm just using it for [safer banking / private chat / business talk / foreign news]
What would be good legitimate candidates for that list? What kind of legitimate content / communication should really enjoy the advantages of Freenet once it becomes popular?
Can anyone give us numbers on the precise percentage of Freenet traffic that kiddie porn makes up?
I'm concerned about the kiddie porn problem, but why the hell would people even go through the trouble of using Freenet just to trade kiddie porn?
It's sick, but sometimes I wonder if the individuals who do upload that shit to Freenet do it precisely to get Freenet shut down.
What better way to get something shut down than to upload kiddie porn? Any serious users wont want to use it anymore and then it will ONLY be filled with kiddie porn, which gives the authorities every reason to ban the entire network as a kiddie porn network.
So the Freenet people should keep precise percentages of the traffic and keep the traffic data public. As long as the majority of the traffic is not kiddie porn, Freenet has a chance at being useful.
Of course Freenet is used for child pornography too, paedophiles would be dumb if they didn't use it for their purposes. You can say whatever you want about paedophiles, I for my myself would call them perverts, disgusting people harming those who can't defend themselves, but one thing I can't say about them is that they're more stupid than other people.
The point is, that Freenet wasn't designed for those people, it was designed to enable everyone to speak up without having to fear censorship. I would estimate that Freenet (0.7) is at least ten times more crowded with "normal" people than it is with paedophiles. I've only twice staggered over paedophile content, of course there's probably much more there but I don't search for it, because of Freenets caching system looking at it equals supporting it, the only way to "censor" this content is not to search for it so it won't spread. The only way we can fight paedophile content actively is to contribute "clean" content, that way we tweak the percentage of child porn and "clean" content. The only way to fight paedophiles is not to bust them, to track them down, to expose them to the angry crowd, that way you get some of them and you get satisfaction for the masses but you don't solve the original problem, it is to give them psychological support, crisis lines, educate the children so they know what to do when confronted with a paedophile. I'm not against penalty for child abusers, but paedophilia is an illness and therefore we should give people who got it a chance to get cured before they can harm our children.
We tend more and more to try to fight the symptoms while we should care more about fighting the cause. This applies to several issues we face today. Instead of building more prisons because of the high youth crime we should be building youth centres and other places for them to meet and do things which are legal. Fighting the symptoms in most cases is easier and gives a more active image in the public, that's why it's a all time favourite of politicians to do so, but we as their voters should take a look behind this masquerade and encourage them not to do so. In a democracy it's not the government which should supervise their citizens, the citizens should supervise the government.
I'm curious...what makes 0.7 less secure and anonymous than 0.5? Can you expand on this?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Your theory incorrectly assumes that such a concerted attack is both reasonably possible and deemed a worthwhile expenditure of the time, effort, and money necessary to succeed. While it's entirely true that government agencies have the power to tap and record all kinds of communications, it's far from true that all communications *are* listened to and analyzed. Not all of the organizations combined have nearly the capacity to handle even a fraction of that data, they don't have the software necessary to analyze it, and they don't have the computing power necessary to run that software if it existed.
It's the distinction between "if the NSA suspects you of being a terrorist, they can listen to your conversations" and "the NSA is listening to all our conversations".